2hollis, the 22-year-old rapper and producer whose whirlwind 2025 included everything from a world tour to nepo-baby allegations, says his first major-label album, Star, satisfied what he felt a breakout pop release needed to do. “It scratched the itch I had for making a more minimal, kind of self-reflecting pop album,” he says on a recent visit to Rolling Stone’s offices. It was also a handy introduction to 2hollis’ maximalist approach to production, with sharp synths cutting through explosive 808s that lent his live set an added extravagance. “For a lot of my projects, the production sometimes felt like the main point, and the vocals came second,” he says, “but this next stuff I’m working on, I’m really working a lot more on the vocals, and the songwriting of it.”
With long blonde hair and a fashion sense that leans toward Rick Owens, 2hollis, who is also quite tall, standing at around 6’4″, looks like a science-fiction supermodel, which partly explains his red-hot viral appeal. Across short-form video apps like TikTok and Reels, fan-made edits paint 2hollis in a majestic light, with slow-motion pans of him moving his hair out of his face, or revealing his chiseled chest on stage. Even without his industry-connected parents (a well-known music publicist and a founding member of the avant-garde group Tortoise, for whatever it’s worth), 2hollis seems born for stardom. “With Star, it was almost like a diary entry of sorts in the process of falling into fame,” he says. “There was a lot of nods to pop music and big EDM stuff that I listened to as a kid.”
If Star is where he scratched the itch of restraint, the next album, he implies, is where he wants to level up as a lyricist. “I’ve been reading a lot, and reading a lot of poetry, and watching a lot more movies,” he says. “Taking in a lot more influences that aren’t music and also listening to a lot of music that has incredible songwriting.” What he’s chasing is narrative clarity inside each song. “I think one thing that I’m really inspired by right now is storytelling in a song, in a really literal way — literally telling a story,” he says. “You listen to the song, and you hear the story, you fully go along with it, and it can be a metaphor for something.”
He positions that as a critique of the moment he’s moving through: “I feel like at least in this current space, I am in the current scene of things that I’m seeing online or whatever, I don’t feel like people are trying that too much, or at least I’m not seeing it in the way I want to see it.”
Online is also where 2hollis’ fandom lives, mutates, and sometimes crosses lines. In addition to those adoring fan edits, 2hollis has been the subject of more obsessive memes, with fans dissecting his every move. “I feel like in a weird way, I manifested this sort of fan base,” he says. “And it’s honestly a bit of a Frankenstein in a way, because it’s great, but it’s also sometimes destructive, because they’re intruding onto my life and picking out and memeing everything and finding things they shouldn’t.” The downside of so-called “lore” is surveillance; the upside is devotion, and he understands both because he used to be on the other side of the screen. “I think I was, at one point, one of those kids… just being a nerd online and dissecting everything about my favorite artist.”
Lately, he’s tried to blunt the feedback loop by stepping away. “I’ve actually been so offline this last two months,” he says. “I’ve been off Instagram, and I don’t have TikTok or Twitter. I haven’t had those for months. Those are just the worst places online ever.” His analogy for the internet is bleak, especially coming from someone so young: “I think it’s a bit [like] maybe cigarettes or something… Obviously, then the consequences hit, and everyone’s like, holy shit, this is terrible. And I think that’s a bit like the internet.”
That break from online comes after a year that sounds like whiplash. “I had a fucking crazy year,” he says. “My house burned down, and all this touring, and then love things and friend things and just a lot of experiences and new things and fame, and just a ton of things happening, family things.” He says December 2025 forced a pause long enough for the meaning to catch up. “I think December, the final month of 2025, I’ve done the most self-reflecting and kind of realizing I’ve maybe ever done in my life. And it’s really bringing me to a place where I’m feeling really, I have a lot of clarity for this next album.”
2hollis is keenly aware of what listeners expect from him, and he says he’s stubbornly drawn to the opposite. “I felt like I was coming up in off of a bunch of singles, like ‘Gold’ and ‘Trauma,’ those are super loud and distorted,” he says. “I thought that’s what everyone expected me to do. And I sometimes like to do exactly what everyone wouldn’t think I would do.”
He adds: “I don’t want to say too much… all I can say is it’s an extremely new direction for me. Get ready. Real art. 2026, 22 years old. Year of the Horse. Let’s go. It’s going to be good.”
